Cosmopolitanisms

Bruce Robbins, Paulo Lemos Horta, and Kwame Anthony Appiah

Abstract

Cosmopolitanism is less an ideal than a description. It merely assumes that wherever and whenever history has set peoples in motion across national boundaries, sometimes by force, many of them and their descendants will show signs of divided loyalties and a hybrid identity. Cosmopolitanism should no longer be conceived as singular—an overrriding loyalty to humanity as a whole—but plural. Instead of an unhealthily skinny ethical abstraction, we now have many blooming, fleshed-out particulars. How much do these variants have in common with each other? How much of the concept’s old normative sens ... More

Cosmopolitanism is less an ideal than a description. It merely assumes that wherever and whenever history has set peoples in motion across national boundaries, sometimes by force, many of them and their descendants will show signs of divided loyalties and a hybrid identity. Cosmopolitanism should no longer be conceived as singular—an overrriding loyalty to humanity as a whole—but plural. Instead of an unhealthily skinny ethical abstraction, we now have many blooming, fleshed-out particulars. How much do these variants have in common with each other? How much of the concept’s old normative sense is preserved or transformed by these empirical particulars? What is it exactly that makes them interesting, makes them valuable? Cosmopolitanism can now be defined as any one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping. There are more kinds of cosmopolitanism out there to be explored and observed. Social scientists, cultural critics, and historians can stake claims to a concept that had largely belonged to philosophers and political theorists. No longer a badge of privilege, it is now possible to speak of the cosmopolitanism of the poor.